"I hope you have a great holiday!

"Re working a trending position, do you have a baby steps style technique that you have found works for you? Or what is the best way to adapt it?

"I keep re reading the baby steps to remind me and in case i missed something. Its really a great read and reminder that we all make the same mistakes, and it seems, thats the only way to learn, unfortunately. But to have a system that takes the pressure off is great. We all hate sitting on our hands, and its sooo frustrating watching positions going up and down while we wait for a breakout.

"I have learnt such a lot listening to you, and as someone else mentioned a while ago, it really helps my 11 month old relax with her late night feed!"

David Fuller's view Thanks for the holiday wishes and amusing feedback.

My Baby Steps swing trading system is all about harvesting some of the ranging activity and it can be deployed most safely in a fundamentally undervalued market which is in a base building phase. However, you can use a modified version when trend running, especially if you have built up a position from strength, most of which is protected with trailing in-the-money-stops.

Take silver, for instance, I think it could go a lot higher over the next year to eighteen months. Time will tell but if so, it is very unlikely to do so in a straight line. So, if you are able to watch the screen and silver surges 70¢ to 100¢ higher on an intraday basis, as we have seen recently, one may wish to take a profit on a portion of that position, with a view to picking it up again on a partial retracement.

Immediately following a dynamic breakout or in a clear medium-term trend, one probably should not sell too much because a strong market can run away from us. However, if the trend is going parabolic, as we saw with silver from February to April last year, one may wish to tighten stops and further reduce the position because it will eventually fall back very sharply.

While Baby Steps is mainly for trading, you could also use it on a different time horizon with trending investment positions. For instance, when a share that you wish to hold for the longer term clearly becomes overextended relative to its 200-day MA, it is very likely to experience mean reversion back to the MA. This is particularly true if you can see a consistent pattern of overextensions and pullbacks, which will be recognised by other investors and therefore have a behavioural component. In this situation, you may wish to take some partial profits on the overextension and buy it back on the reversion while the overall trend consistency is maintained.